Art: Patching the Cathedral

Famed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, was getting its face lifted. Last week, at just about the halfway mark in an ambitious repair job, tubular-steel cobwebs festooned the neo-Gothic church. St. Patrick’s had cost only $1,500,000 by the time it was dedicated in 1879; the patching had already taken $1,000,000, would take another year and another million dollars.

To architectural purists St. Pat’s was a somewhat lumpy mixture of the Cologne and Rouen cathedrals, with a touch of Westminster Abbey inside. They pointed out that some of its supports and buttresses, borrowed from European cathedrals, where they were essential parts of the structure, were pasted on to St. Pat’s merely for looks. Repairs had exposed brick underpinnings; proved its marble beauty skin-deep.

Architectural gem or paste, St. Pat’s was nevertheless one of the city’s landmarks, on one of the most highly valued sites in Manhattan. The rock beneath it had cost only $1,600 in 1810. Now, in the bustling shadow of Rockefeller Center, the two-acre lot is valued at more than $14,000,000.

A gang of 250 stonesetters, carvers, riggers, glassworkers and structural iron men on the job were putting 27,000 cubic ft. of Georgia marble and 6,000 sq. ft. of Maine slate into fixing up the walls and the leaky roof. They had reinforced the wooden interior beams, which were starting to rot, replaced the stone crosses set atop the spires in 1888. A $25,000 new rose window was being fashioned in Boston. Bronze main doors will replace the “temporary” wooden ones—which have stood for 70 years.